Applied AI Weekly News

Justin Grammens

Welcome, Applied AI Weekly Readers, to the latest issue! I'm thrilled to once again share with you the most interesting articles on artificial intelligence that I've found this past week.

Issue Highlights

In this issue, we cover OpenAI’s secretive new social network prototype and ChatGPT’s expanded memory capabilities, which now reference all past conversations. We also highlight breakthroughs in image and video generation, smarter reward models from DeepSeek, and Claude’s new ability to search your entire Google Workspace. Before we go there and get into the details, here are a few things I wish to share.

Upcoming Events

Our next Applied AI event is Trust vs Transparency in AI. We'll be talking about as AI systems become more integrated into our daily lives, the need to build public trust in these technologies is greater than ever.
I'm also thrilled to be speaking at Open Source North! The title of my talk is DeepSeek: The Open-Source AI That Changed the Game

A Bit of Thanks

Thank you to everyone who attended the closing keynote I did at the Illinois Association of Home Care & Hospice on April 2nd. My talk covered the new wave of agents that will transform the way home care and hospice providers provide care. I look forward to returning next year!
Thank you to everyone who came out and supported me and the panel at the Future of Healthcare Conference at the University of Saint Thomas. Here's some photos of our panel at the event with Minnesota healthcare leaders.
I'm continuing to offer free consultations and workshops with many business leaders on how AI is changing the landscape of how you will run your business today and into the future. Connect today and book a meeting with me.

Now that we have that covered, please enjoy the articles I have spent time finding and curating for you this past week.

Finally, please do reach out if there is anything you feel I might have missed. Enjoy!

News

OpenAI Is Building a Social Network

While the project is still in early stages, we’re told there’s an internal prototype focused on ChatGPT’s image generation that has a social feed. CEO Sam Altman has been privately asking outsiders for feedback about the project, our sources say. It’s unclear if OpenAI’s plan is to release the social network as a separate app or integrate it into ChatGPT, which became the most downloaded app globally last month. An OpenAI spokesperson didn’t respond in time for publication.

ChatGPT's Memory Can Now Reference All Past Conversations, Not Just What You Tell It To

OpenAI is slowly rolling out better memory on ChatGPT, making it a default for ChatGPT to reference past conversations. This has raised the fear that the platform is proactively “listening” to users, making them uncomfortable with how much the platform knows.

ChatGPT already logs information from previous interactions through its Memory feature, ensuring preferences are saved and conversations can seamlessly continue from where the user left off.

DeepSeek Unveils New Technique for Smarter, Scalable AI Reward Models

DeepSeek AI, a Chinese research lab gaining recognition for its powerful open-source language models, such as DeepSeek-R1, has introduced a significant advancement in reward modeling for large language models (LLMs).

Their new technique, Self-Principled Critique Tuning (SPCT), aims to create generalist and scalable reward models (RMs). This could potentially lead to more capable AI applications for open-ended tasks and domains where current models can’t capture the nuances and complexities of their environment and users.

No Elephants: Breakthroughs in image generation

Over the past two weeks, first Google and then OpenAI rolled out their multimodal image generation abilities. This is a big deal. Previously, when a Large Language Model AI generated an image, it wasn’t really the LLM doing the work. Instead, the AI would send a text prompt to a separate image generation tool and show you what came back. The AI creates the text prompt, but another, less intelligent system creates the image. For example, if prompted “show me a room with no elephants in it, make sure to annotate the image to show me why there are no possible elephants,” the less intelligent image generation system would see the word elephant multiple times and add them to the picture. As a result, AI image generations were pretty mediocre, with distorted text and random elements; sometimes fun, but rarely useful.

Audiences Are Still Skeptical About Generative AI in the News

Dozens of America’s most well-known newsrooms are experimenting with chatbots to help readers pick restaurants, learn more about political candidates, and dive deeper into articles. But new research from Poynter and the University of Minnesota shows people may not be ready for it.

Introducing 4o Image Generation

At OpenAI, we have long believed image generation should be a primary capability of our language models. That’s why we’ve built our most advanced image generator yet into GPT‑4o. The result—image generation that is not only beautiful but also useful.

Sponsor

Leverage Artificial Intelligence to Bring Efficiency and Automation to Your Business

At Recursive Awesome, we have a team of consultants to help leaders leverage Artificial Intelligence to bring efficiency and automation to their business. We are experts in strategy, implementation, and training to help you use modern technology and AI tools from leading solution providers. Contact us today!

Business

Nvidia AI Chip Production Lands in the US to Avoid Trump's Tariffs

The news comes as tariffs announced by President Donald Trump have spurred anxiety about the cost of importing technology and products historically manufactured overseas. Most of the tariffs announced this month have been put on hold after a major stock market decline, and the Trump administration exempted some electronics, including phones and computers, from certain tariffs over the weekend.

Healthcare

The AI Therapist Can See You Now

Many AI products claim to deliver mental health therapy, but with little quality control. But new research suggests with the right training, AI can be effective at helping people.

Enterprise

The Dawn of Agentic AI: Transforming Enterprise Automation and the Future of Work

At Hitachi Ventures, we’ve been exploring agentic AI infrastructure and applications, even experimenting with building our own task management and summarization agents. When we began last year, the market was largely dominated by ChatGPT wrappers and open-source frameworks. However, we’ve seen more founders and operators assembling components to build fully automated workflows capable of handling unstructured data and dynamic contexts. We invite you to engage us in a dialog as we continue to expand our understanding.

Industrial

Cognex: Vision Quest - Business Breakdowns

Today, we are breaking down the machine vision leader, Cognex. Cognex Corporation is an American manufacturer of machine vision systems, software, and sensors used in automated manufacturing to inspect and identify parts, detect defects, verify product assembly, and guide assembly robots. It is not your typical reoccurring revenue story. They are a self-proclaimed cyclical that has tended to focus on a specific customer segment over time, looking for S-curves that might trigger their next growth era.

Video

Ayisha Tabbassum - AI Upskilling: A New Era of Workforce Empowerment

The conversation this week is with Ayisha Tabbassum. Ayisha is a visionary technology leader with more than 10 years of experience in driving business infused technology initiatives and digital transformation in large enterprises. She's the founde...

Google Rolls out Its AI Video Generator to Gemini Advanced Subscribers

Google is letting Gemini Advanced subscribers try out Veo 2, its text-to-video AI model that it says is capable of creating high-resolution clips with “cinematic realism.” Starting today, subscribers can select Veo 2 from the Gemini model dropdown on the web and mobile, where they can enter a prompt to generate an eight-second video in 720p.

Development

Claude Just Gained Superpowers: Anthropic's AI Can Now Search Your Entire Google Workspace Without You

Anthropic launched major upgrades to its Claude AI assistant today, introducing an autonomous research capability and Google Workspace integration that transform the AI into what the company calls a “true virtual collaborator” for enterprise users. The expansion directly challenges OpenAI and Microsoft in the increasingly competitive market for AI productivity tools.

The new Research capability enables Claude to independently conduct multiple searches that build upon each other while determining what to investigate next. Simultaneously, the Google Workspace integration connects Claude to users’ emails, calendars, and documents, eliminating the need for manual uploads.

Introducing Gemma 3: The Developer Guide

Since its first launch, Gemma models have been downloaded over 100 million times, with the community creating over 60,000 variations for all kinds of use cases. We are excited to introduce Gemma 3, our most capable and advanced version of the Gemma open-model family, building upon the success of previous Gemma releases. We listened to community feedback and added the most requested features, such as longer context, multimodality, and more!

Gemini Robotics Brings AI into the Physical World

At Google DeepMind, we've been making progress in how our Gemini models solve complex problems through multimodal reasoning across text, images, audio, and video. So far, however, those abilities have been largely confined to the digital realm. In order for AI to be useful and helpful to people in the physical realm, they have to demonstrate “embodied” reasoning — the humanlike ability to comprehend and react to the world around us— as well as safely take action to get things done.